The charitable arm of the United Services Automobile Association, the Texas-based Fortune 500 company that offers financial services to military families, has given $2 million to endow a faculty chair in ethics at the Naval Academy, the academy's foundation announced yesterday.

The gift, one of the largest received by the foundation, creates the Robert T. Herres Distinguished Military Professor in Leadership and Ethics chair, named after the 1954 academy alumnus and recently retired chairman and chief executive officer of USAA.

The endowment will allow the military college to lure prominent faculty at higher salaries than it could with public dollars.

The chair will oversee the main ethics course for sophomores, "Ethics and Moral Reasoning for the Naval Officer."